I recently watched a video on YouTube which led me down the path of starting to document something that has been on my mind for some time, which is the recovery of the right brain. This has been a major factor in my life for the last decade and more, and it has profoundly affected how I view and experience my life. The experience of meditating, writing novels, and playing the piano has helped me rediscover the joy and creativity of my early childhood and has allowed it expression in my adult life.

I have come to believe that the passion that I often hear of is on the one hand an elitist illusion, for most people can't pursue their dreams and make a living in this way; but on the other hand it is chasing the wrong dream, for passion can be found in unexpected places if we simply allow ourselves to behave naturally and out of the right brain. This is something that can be easily cultivated and rediscovered without complicated exercises and training programs. Watch the short video, Passion, Creativity and Livelihood, and follow me as I develop this thinking in future posts.

The Power of the Novel

I can carefully craft an email and nonetheless find that its recipient reads into the note something that was not intended. Such is the danger of short messages as personal communication. More recently I have found that when I am not careful about making my facebook posts either entirely self-reflective and about me (which is generally boring for others) or arbitrary and objective (posting funny or "interesting" content in 420 characters or less), I can leave a message open to interpretation by others in a manner that they can take personally and find offensive. Worse (though I am not aware of committing this particular offense), it is clearly possible to cause considerable unintended hurt. How much worse is Twitter: clearly in this medium I must focus on simply writing links to content, and not creating 140-character commentary in its own right. So how can one convey a truly personal message and create intimacy through social media? It is a problem I have not really solved.

But this is where the power of the novel comes in. In a novel one writes from the heart, and the deepest personal truths come out. A reader of the novel really gets to know the author, and if they find something they don't like, it will be based on a lot of evidence! I love writing novels, not because I have any particular conceit that they are any good, or even that anyone will read them, but because they are a way for me to take off the manacles of most of today's communications and simply write unfettered. It is a wonderfully liberating experience. Remember, when you read a novel, that no matter what the external form, the author has just spent approximately one hundred thousand words writing intimately about themselves.

Stalking a Mezzo-Soprano

Leandra Ramm is an aspiring mezzo-soprano with a problem. Someone has posted thousands of internet messages asserting a lack of talent, and reinforced the messages on a blog under Leandra's name and by posting obscene messages on her own website. The police in New York (where she lives) claim they have no jurisdiction over activities apparently perpetrated by a resident of Singapore, but the Singapore authorities have no reason to show interest.

Many people suffer from online persecution and are often more intimately related to their persecutor, such as the woman who broke up with her lover and within days received shocked emails from her friends asking about her new website. It turns out that the spurned male had created a website in his former affianced’s name, uploaded all the bedroom photos and videos he had amassed, and emailed her friends from the website address with an innocuous, “Come and look at my new website.”

There is a question under these stories that I cannot yet articulate, but it goes beyond understanding the difficulties of the individuals who live under this shadow, or their efforts to rebuild a life and reputation; it goes beyond even the motives of the malintents perpetrating this suffering or the role of society in perpetuating and hopefully reining in this behavior. There is something happening here that I feel I need to look at very closely.

The Cultivation of Insight

When I recently spoke on Career Day at my teenage son's school, I focused my comments on three life lessons I thought highly relevant to the students: staying flexible through and looking up from the job for opportunities; building and maintaining a personal network; and remaining a lifelong learner. These are easy to say, but even though I believe in them, I find them hard to practice. But when I come back to these ideas, I realize that they point for me at something very deep, which is my own tendency to get caught up in my activities, my personal story, and my own environment. I like to see things in a way that reinforces the identity I am most comfortable wearing. This is clearly nuts! It is when I lift my head up and look around with intention and clarity that I can see how narrow my view has become, and start to see other perspecives. From that place I can begin to look at what is going on in my life and in society at large, and start to ask, "What is really happening here?" "What is going on?" When my life is on a smooth glide I have time and space and these thoughts come up often, but even when life is not as steady, they run in the background. It is from this place that the seeds of my novels grow, and it is the source of my spiritual practice. It is an important place for me to nurture, and it is from here that I can cultivate insight into my life and the world around me.